


We have not touched the stars

by lilith_morgana



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-15
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-03-17 23:23:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3547583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The nature that surrounds them is scattered and interlaced and neither of them belong to the pattern here. It weaves them closer together from the very start.</p><p>Malika Cadash, Blackwall and Iron Bull, together and apart and everything in between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I had this idea about a OT3 fic about these three for a long while and then it sort of just happened. Three people, three parts.

****  
  
  
_We have not touched the stars,_  
_nor are we forgiven, which brings us back_  
_to the hero’s shoulders and the gentleness that comes,_  
_not from the absence of violence, but despite_  
_the abundance of it._  
  
Richard Siken - Crush

 

 

 

 

She carries a mark that glows from the inside; carries a whole lifetime by the time she reaches Haven's damp prison cells, carries the scars and the dents, the  _ghosts_.

He smells of salt and water, of rough winds and air and blood. He's massive and strange and so honest that she immediately distrusts him.

He smells of earth and mud and metal, of smoked salmon and wood, a sweet trace of wood through everything. He's guarded and gruff and closed around his own secrets; she knows a lot about harm and he means none.

The nature the surrounds them is scattered and interlaced and neither of them belong to the pattern here. It weaves them closer together from the very start.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He truly hadn't expected her to go out of her way to do him a favour. She can tell by the tone of his voice, the way his gaze falls. She had done it because she knew he would never demand it, had done it because she feels that he  _deserves_  it somehow but she doesn't tell him that, merely makes it sound like it was on the way.

There are legends of the Grey Wardens - legends of steel and temperance, of sacrifice and pride, legends in dirt and blood and stone, the ancient undying stones of the Deep Roads. They're harsh and heroic but it's heroism based on having no choice, on having nothing left to lose, a dark undercurrent through their Order. You don't get much from a Grey Warden, they give you nothing, fear nothing. This one is different, different from the ones she's met and heard of. It throws her slightly off her feet at first; humility is deadly for anyone leading her kind of life, is ridiculed and _ridiculous_ and old habits die hard but she's never been one to be set in her ways.

Warden Blackwall is simple and decent and common, a fresh breath of familiarity here among the nobles and almost-royalty and others who perhaps _ought_ to be kin but aren't. _Varric_ who speaks to her as though they'd share something - history, knowledge, experience - but all she can think about is that he's a _Tethras_ , high up in the Guild.

Warden Blackwall is the sort of man that knows about injustice and privilege, the thousand tiny little pinpricks of hurt and anger that run over the course of your life, unknown to most people you ever meet.

”I'll take a compliment from a lady,” he retorts, polite even when they are - for all intents and purposes - merely teasing, tossing words and versions of trite lines between each other. ”They're hard to come by these days.”

”There's more where that came from,” she says and even though it's a silly line it gets caught mid-air, in his wondrous reaction to it and the cough as he regains his composure.  
  
So much desperate power in it – in _him_ – and it's a rush to feel it trickle down over her skin, like a warm rain.  
  


 

* * *

 

  
  
“You fight like you were trained by the Carta,” the Iron Bull tells her down by the training grounds. He's dropped his battleaxe beside her bow, almost expectantly.  
  
Malika scoffs, eyeing him carefully.  
  
“You just read up on my personal history. Or made Josephine tell you.” He has a way with her, she knows. Has a way with most people, to be honest, especially those she would never pin down as likely to be _charmed_.  
  
“Maybe I did.” He grins at her. _Damn_. “Maybe I didn't.”  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
Blackwall – he calls himself that now in his head just in case, blocking out everything else like a mindless soldier on an unspeakable mission – had not expected the Inquisition to be quite like this. Of course, he had barely known it existed until the Herald barged in on his quiet life of repentance among the grateful farmers and fishermen in the Hinterlands but even so, it is nothing like he might have expected it to be.  
  
The Storm Coast hits him hard when he sees it again but some of it is drowned in campfire tales and rotating schedules for watching their outpost through the rainy nights.  
  
The Herald hands out mugs of warm wine and plates of roasted boar with onion broth as the Iron Bull wonders about the lack of leadership for their little war effort.  
  
She slumps down in the middle of them, Blackwall to her right, Iron Bull to her left, and takes a large gulp of wine.  
  
“Perhaps _I_ should lead,” she says, as though it's nothing – or everything.  
  
“You?” The Qunari grunts, but he's not in disagreement, Blackwall can sense as much. He's always searching, that one. Looking for patterns and diverting paths, the odd one out. It ought to feel more unsettling, truly. “Why you?”  
  
“Someone should.” Her face looks older in this grey fog that sinks down over them as night forms and daylight fades out. Pale and freckled, scars running through her skin like history, ever-present. It makes three of them, he thinks, not for the first time. Scarred old veterans speaking of Andraste like they had any right to. “I'm willing.”  
  
Iron Bull doesn't say anything else, merely nods.  
  
And perhaps it's as simple as that.  
  
  


* * *

 

 

The Iron Bull doesn't care for demons.

It's not the dying, it's the habit they have of twisting and turning inside you once they get a foothold and he's not keen on giving them that, not willing to bend his knee for any damn creature looking to corrupt his mind. Ironic perhaps for a Ben-Hassrath, but there's the heart of it, right there. How the mages do it - dance around with the mana and the Fade crap and the spells that cross the borders between life and death, death and undeath - yeah, he doesn't like to think about it much.

The boss seems to find that particular thing about him very fascinating. Probably easier when you're a dwarf, cut off from the Fade. Or carry a bit of it around on your wrist.

"Don't worry, I'll protect you," she says and the casual amusement – and something else, something _more_? Hell if he knows - is thick in her voice.

He watches her when she walks away, watches the sway of her broad hips and the rhythm of her steps - heavy but fast, always on the move, all of the Inquisition embodied in that distracting stride - and thinks with a surprised grin that he believes her.

Imagine that.  


 

* * *

  
  
  
Blackwall ties the knot of tattered wraps tighter over her arm, a worried frown on his face.  
  
“You need a healer to take a look at that. We don't know what the red lyrium does to the templars, let alone their victims.”  
  
Shrugging, Malika rolls down the sleeve over the injury. He lets his own hand linger on her upper arm, as though he's guarding it against her neglect. They are on their way to Therinfal Redoubt, there is no time for coddling. “It's fine.”  
  
“My lady-”  
  
“It's _fine_ ,” she repeats, pressing his hand between her own when she speaks. She doesn't tell him that she's no damn lady; she doesn't tell him there are things in her past that would give him pause, would make him hesitate the next time he wanted to dress one of her wounds with that gentle, attentive care, that shiver through them both; she doesn't tell him that she prefers him not to know her too well.  
  
Instead she presses her lips to the back of his hand, like a knight shifting the burden of impossible virtue until it rests on his shoulders.  
  
  
  


* * *

  


 

Haven falls and she blames the mages, just slightly, just quietly in her own head for a moment when she stops to catch her breath. She needs _someone_ to blame, reckons she's earned it and doesn't care if it's petty because _she_ is. They had played with high stakes and lost more than they gained – a handful of templars and a broken, twisted Order – and the losses taste of ashes and dirt.  
  
The snow reaches to her sodding tits in some parts of these woods and her feet are heavy and wet, her hands aching from a dozen fresh cuts and a deep, burning injury right in the middle of her right palm. Haven burns behind her eyelids, smoke and fire in her throat.  
  
Sodding mages and their fucking revolution.

The next thing she remembers is the Commander's voice, then Mother Gisele and, in the distance, the sight of Blackwall straightening up to get a better look at the tent where she's been resting. He looks like he's dropped a load as heavy as all the stones in Haven when their eyes meet and the relief in him is a blow to her chest.

 

 

* * *

  


 

The dusks at Skyhold are slow, nearly endless, as though the last light just as easily could be the first. The soft, hairy undersides of the leaves on the trees flicker like silver-streaks in the air.   
  
Malika runs a finger along the outlines of a large fallen leaf and listens as Blackwall tells her about duty and honour, about lives not owned by themselves. It's a coward's explanation and he is, regardless of what he wants to believe about himself, not a coward.  
  
”You're _wrong_ ,” she says when he's finished. She isn't blind to the hope in his face when she walks away, the conflicted irritation in all those cracks in their once so solid ground.   
  
That evening she drinks with the Iron Bull and lets herself be without limits for the first time since she left the Carta to carry out a spy mission that wrecked her life. One tankard for the stupid idiots who sent her to Haven, one for the trap of it all, the lack of escape routes; one tankard for Thora and Undi, one for Undi's family medallion and Thora's treasured maul tossed over a pile of unidentifiable corpses in the ruins like they had not _mattered_ ; one tankard for Haven, another one for everyone they had to leave behind, coming here. One tankard full of disgustingly weak piss-ale for that expression in Blackwall's face as he had pretended not to share the sense of falling rapidly, overwhelmingly down a sodding hole every time they touch.  
  
Iron Bull doesn't say anything but she feels his gaze on her skin, feels his hands around her arms a they leave. She's half-way to her own quarters before she realises he's carrying her, her feet very far from the ground. The veins beneath his skin are visible when he turns his head; with her gaze she follows the length of a scar that begins somewhere at the back of his broad neck, travelling down his back. His heartbeats are steady, heavy and strong like the rest of him, like the companionship he offers.  
  
“Kiss me,” she mutters when he finally puts her down near her bed.  
  
She has heard the tales already spreading among the servants and soldiers, like a giggling echo between the walls. She expects very little resistance.  
  
But Iron Bull merely offers a wry kind of half-smile and shakes his head.  
  
“Ask me again some other time, boss.”  


 

 

* * *

  


The Storm Coast again, thunder cracking manically above their heads when they wait for the weather to let up. Sera and Vivienne are engaged in one of their regular arguments about how to present oneself, Solas and Dorian discuss Tevinter and Malika listens to Iron Bull's attempts to make Blackwall uncomfortable with a conversation about the bananas of Par Vollen.  
  
“You are talking about the fruit, right?” He sighs and leans back against the tall stone behind them. “ _Please_ tell me you are talking about the fruit.”  
  
“Wouldn't you like to know, big guy.” Iron Bull mock-wiggles his eyebrow.  
  
Blackwall groans softly and Malika laughs and shakes her head, perfectly warm in the freezing cold.  
  


 

* * *

 

 

 

The Iron Bull takes nothing seriously, not even himself. _Ride the bull_ , he says, grinning broadly where he's seated and for a second she regrets it, regrets _him_ ; he's a sodding Qunari, he'll wreck her, he even seems to think so himself.

The Iron Bull takes everything seriously. There are rules and boundaries, words and deeds for trust and respect and protection and it's a lump in her throat and a shiver down her spine and she forgets the restrictions of it all when he whispers those last bits of caution into the skin on her neck.

 _I had to see you_ , Blackwall says and kisses the breath out of her; his hands around her waist, her hands making tight knots in his hair and they're protecting nobody, least of all themselves.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

  
  
  
  


The sand is unrelenting around them. Like a prison, trapping them from below.  
  
Blackwall - and the name is written on the massive dunes here, every gust of wind or hint of water threaten to wipe it out - breathes uneasy here.  
  
“So you feel that shit too?” The Iron Bull leans against the wall of the keep that isn’t theirs, arms folded over his chest. In this harsh sunlight he looks like something out of a legend, a darker one than the Wardens’, less prone to heroics. _Takes one to know one, eh,_ _Rainier_. “The Calling?”  
  
The Qunari possesses an uncanny ability to take everything apart, take everything down to its bare essentials, Blackwall – not Rainier, he’s _not_ Rainier, he has not been Rainier since – _no_ – thinks. Like the skilful spy he has trained to be, he knows how to remove the masks and refinements others cloak themselves in. Strip you to the bloody bone. It’s unnerving and impressive in equal measures.  
  
He shrugs. “I’m not afraid of the Calling.”  
  
There’s something passing in the Qunari’s eye then, a shade of recollection or a hint of doubt.  
  
“Didn’t say you were,” he says and his voice is low, almost soft.

  
  


* * *

 

 

“You never ask me about my past.” She's in Iron Bull's lap, her tits brushing against his chest as they catch their breaths and she tracks a rivulet of sweat that runs down his throat. The desert's too hot for this, too hot for anything but rest but there is none to be found and they're at it again, pausing only briefly; it's a maddening sort of rhythm, a twist to your head, your heart if you let if but she's not certain they do.

He shrugs; the motion makes her entire body shake slightly. “You tell me the important bits.”

“What if we disagree?” She feels the presence of hands along the inner of her thighs again, large palms made careful, made almost entirely new to fit her – _don't worry, I've had enough dwarves to know what I'm doing_ – and her chest aches a little bit with how well-constructed it all is. “About what's important.”  
  
“Yeah.” Bull chuckles as he reaches her still-swollen regions that make her body stir once more, makes her rock against him. “I figure we don't.”  
  
And Blackwall, ever-stoic as he guards his past and their future alike, arms folded across his chest like a shield every time she asks, speculates, or outright needles him.

“I don't care who you were then.” Voice warm, but shut tight around the words, leaving her with no way in and no escape. “I like the woman you are now.”  
  
She knows in that moment that he's got darkness he doesn't want her to see; she wonders when he will slip, when it will all fall apart at the seams.   
  
She wonders in that moment if the woman she really is will care for the man inside the patchwork armour.   
  
  


 

* * *

 

  
  


“So,” Varric says and his tone is drawn-out and deliberate as always when he wants to dig deep into territories he knows are out of limits. “You and our Qunari friend?”

People talk, they've let her know recently. People gossip like it's important what she does in her personal chamber, who she fucks and who she tells sickeningly sweet things in between duties, between getting stabbed by swords and scorched in the desert and spending another night reading reports about death, death, death.   
  
Yet people _talk_. 

“Yes.” Malika sips her wine. It doesn't suit her, the _sipping_ , but it's still warm, the spicy undertones rising like flames in her nostrils.

“And our Warden friend?"

“Yes.”

“How does that thing even work?”

She shrugs, voice deliberately bored, like it means nothing. What they are, that he asks.   
  
“You're a writer, Tethras. Use your imagination.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Rumour has it the Inquisitor and the Iron Bull are scaring the servants in the dead of the night. Or the middle of the day. Or noon, Thom – _Blackwall_ , but it eludes him now, slipping fast - supposes. He can't say he much cares for it. Can't say that it upsets him, either, but it's a novelty to him, whatever it is that's going on with them. _Her? Both?_  
  
He shakes his head, orders another tankard of ale.   
  
Women used to be the only thing that was simple in his life. Women and being a soldier, using his shield and his sword to follow orders; two things that have provided shelter for him for years, a whole lifetime of uncomplicated boundaries and clearly drawn patterns in the sand.   
  
Here, everything's being washed away. Crushed and remade, reshaped.

His lady – she _is_ one, in his heart she is one if only for the fact that she wants him, at least a little and in parts – who has so very little patience with the man he's trying to be, who would probably have preferred Captain Thom Rainier and the dark swirl of _that_ , like poison in his head. _Fucking ironic, isn't it, Rainier?_  
  
And the Qunari who serves them all vile drinks and tales of dragon hunting, like something out of a fairy tale to keep them far away from the reality. He's an excellent liar about nothing in particular, puts on a good show. Thom – he is never Blackwall around the Qunari, admits defeat without even being challenged – listens to the stories like the rest of them; they land differently in him, he thinks, mean other things.   
  
Sometimes he thinks about what it must be like, being a Ben-Hassrath.   
  
Sometimes – most of the time, really, his mind is a crude, base place - he thinks about what it must be like for a dwarf lady and a Qunari the size of a mountain and there's nothing in his own vast experience that would come even _close_ to that. It's a torrent of thoughts, of images, digging deeper and deeper into his skull, the back of his head. 

“ _How_?” he asks it once, half-accident, half-deliberation, surrounded by roaring soldiers and emptied cups and the Iron Bull laughs, a thunder through the room.

“I could show you, Big Guy.” he nods towards the fresh refill in Thom's cup. “You probably want to finish that, though.”  
  


  
  


* * *

 

 

“Trying to blend in?” Bull nods at Blackwall who stands by the weird statues in this overblown palace, still and stiff like he's aspiring to become one of them. It's meant as a joke, but it's clear from the way the Warden is looking at him that it's not hitting the right spot. Perhaps there are no right spots, not tonight, not in this crowd. It's not like Bull hasn't figured out a long time ago that Blackwall isn't half as simple as he says he is – _just a soldier, born and raised in Markham, not much more to it_ – he just can't tell yet what is missing, exactly. And he doesn't care, not professionally, not personally; the man's decent and skilled and great to have around on the battlefield, all experience and strategy. Bull loves that shit, it gives him room to just go all in without having to worry.   
  
“Food's excellent,” he tries instead.   
  
Blackwall nods. “I'm not hungry. Don't care for Orlesian food.”  
  
“Liar.” Bull eyes a pretty little thing to their left – young servant boy, all chin and arms and weird floppy hair that makes him look like an animal – while he finished the last on his plate. “Everyone likes Orlesian food. Now, the nobles on the other hand...”  
  
For a short while something opens in the other man's gaze, a gash that lets light or a shadow breaking through in there, but it's gone as quickly as it appeared.   
  
Later, after wine and bloodshed and the kind of ballroom dancing that is more lethal than a battlefield full of Tevinter magisters, Bull sees it again, that gash; Blackwall is dancing with the boss, properly and courteously like they’re _meant_ to be here. A quick sting in Bull's chest, like worry. For what, he can't really pinpoint.   
  
 _Nah_. He shrugs off the sentiment. He's getting fucking maudlin from all this food.   
  
  
  
  
  


* * *

 

 

 

The call him animal on the streets of Val Royeaux. Butcher, murderer, _monster_ and the syllables grow in her head, hammering against her thoughts. The man inside, she thinks, this is her man inside that armour. 

It's not his crimes that twist back and forth like a blade that refuses to be pulled out, it's not his _crimes_. It ought to be, perhaps, but it's not. It's the scene, the whole structure of complications and consequences that pull at her, threaten to dissolve the ground beneath their feet.

“I don't understand humans,” she confesses to Bull who lets one large hand cover her shoulder for a little while; she leans into it, relaxes as he holds both of them up and the sun sets on what would have been the day of Mornay's execution.   
  
"These are Orlesians,” he says and he makes it sound like a disease you catch or a wound inflicted and it brings a smile out of her, despite it all.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
The boss is making him a Grey Warden.   
  
Interesting, Bull concludes out on the training ground when Blackwall finally drags his ass out there after a fortnight of not even leaving the stables for meals. And fitting. She likes that; when he thinks about it he can almost see how satisfied she must have been when she made the decision. Practical, fitting punishments when they are necessary, turning blind eyes when they are not.   
  
“Hit me,” he says.   
  
Blackwall – Bull figures people get to choose their names, figures it's none of his damn business and the man is _Blackwall_ – gives him a long, searching glance. They've done this before, but this is different. Everything is, now. For starters, this guy is a walking mess of guilt and shame and _hate_ that burns in the pit of his stomach, that goes nowhere because all of it is meant for Blackwall and only Blackwall. That's no way to live, but it takes time to see it.   
  
“Fought with a Grey Warden once,” Bull continues when he's caught his breath after the first blow. A hard one; he's not the only one who needs this today. “Great archer. Good in bed too, but with that bow? _Damn_. She had killed her husband and two neighbours. Put arrows in their heads and tried to burn their corpses. Hero of Ferelden herself got her out of the gallows.”   
  
It's a nice memory: Ferelden, fog and a casket shared with the archer and her Warden-Commander.   
  
Blackwall shrugs. “Maybe they had done something to deserve it.”  
  
Bull shrugs, too. “Maybe. Or maybe she just hated the bastards. Either way, the Grey Wardens sure didn't care.”  
  
“Yeah?” Another blow, more forceful this time, _focused_.   
  
“Yeah.” Bull winces as the stab of pain in his leg goes from bad to fucking nightmarish, then he regains his momentum. “My point is that you'll feel right at home.”  
  
“Thank you, I suppose.” It's impossible to tell if the tone is sarcastic or genuine; it doesn't really matter.   
  
“Any time, big guy. Now, seriously, hit me with all you've got.”  
  
  


 


End file.
